Please forgive the raw geek post.  If you have no idea what a virtual machine is, just skip to the picture of the pony at the bottom.

It’s been a few months now since Nikki got me my first Mac, so as a Windows user I am now more fully coming around to new habits and shortcuts.  I use Windows all day long at work, so the Mac habits have been a little slower to become second-nature than they probably would have normally.  Still, they are coming along quite nicely.  I have also settled into the new desktop, finally.  I no longer flounder when trying to find that window I know is running, but have minimized to the dock.  I am slowly learning the (still arcane) differences between the option and command keys.  Mutiple select is still an achilles heel, but I now find myself reaching for alt-T on windows to open a new Firefox tab, so some things are definitely sinking in.

Running Windows on the iMac is something I was always planning on, since Windows pays the bills I will always need it somewhere.  I had always assumed that I would be using Boot Camp to do just that and just be living with the inconvenience of restarting each time.  I figured that this way would work just fine, but most importantly it was free, and I’m incredibly cheap when it comes to this stuff.  So, I almost started that process, but decided at the last to check around to see what I could find in the virtualization area for this purpose.  Man, am I ever glad I did.  I stumbled onto Sun Virtualbox, a free VM engine that runs on OSX very very nicely.  So nicely in fact that after I had set up a quick XP VM I found that I could run it in a Spaces desktop in full screen mode, and it’s just dandy.  There’s something magical about alt-tabbing, er cmd-tabbing through the open apps and sliding right into a windows desktop.  I still need to get the work VPN installed there and a few other things, but man, this is the real thing folks.

Speaking of Spaces, I like this feature so much that I have actually installed Dexpot on the Vista box at work so I can have a similar experience. It’s not as smooth as I would like, I particularly miss the full cmd-tab list of open windows and just switching to that desktop when I select it, but it’s pretty good so far.

Now, something for the non-geeks, suitably distracting I hope.

Look, a pony!